I have been struck with a strong feeling that it is all a flashback. I know it can't be true. And although my chess game keeps improving I have to wonder what my age (74) means in terms of my mental powers. I can do anything you ask in higher math and my memory has always been very selective. I looked back at some of Norman Mailer's writings to see if I could establish a bench mark and I feel like I did. Two things in particular are what I will focus on in this diary. I shared a lot of experiences with Mailer back in the 1960s and then read his version to see how two people could be at the same events and yet experience them very differently. Of course he was a "journalist" and I was a movement "leader". From hindsight that seems to matter very little. The two things I want to discuss below are the idea he had that it was good when the extremists on the right made the whole thing very visible. "Gave it a face" is how he put it. The second is that we both considered voting for Goldwater. Read on below before you jump to any conclusions.
First let's talk about giving something a "face". Mailer believed that the extreme right was a caricature of all that is diseased about this country. He did not see it so much in factual and statistical ways but was very emotional about it. Now that I have digested most of what George Lakoff has written I find mailer to be very prophetic. He was a prophet to me ever since he wrote The Naked and the Dead and had those wonderful conversations between the General and the Lieutenant who was his aide. Mailer was in touch with America's gut if not its soul. The John Birchers "came out" when Goldwater began to seriously think about running for President and that was good in Mailer's view. As long as they schemed and stewed behind the scenes we had less of an idea of what they were up to.
Today we have Sarah Palin and the Tea Baggers (What a name for a band?)and they have been very visible. If Mailer were alive I think he would be having fun with this. The myths they claim are the values they are struggling for are not that different from those the Birchers were all about back then. What has changed?
That's where the 1964 election may tell us something. I was on my post-doc in Israel from 1963 to 1965 so I experienced the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco, and the presidential election in a very very different way than most Americans did.
Mailer was also always viewing events in a way most Americans could not. That was because he was Mailer. So both of us ended up having a genuine dilemma about whether to support LBJ (Hey, hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today?) or the man on the right. Oh those Tee Vee ads with the mushroom clouds. I never saw them 'cause Israel only got Tee Vee from the Arab countries in those days and needless to say that was to watch American Westerns.
We had our problem because we watched what led us to that point. I still have the little book by the French journalist that quotes the likes of Nixon and Dulles and the others saying we needed to get in their where the French had failed because of tin and tungsten and bases to ring China. The American people did not buy that. But then came JFK with words like "freedom" and "democracy" and such and he sold intervention in stages. By 1964 it seemed clear that the itch to go in full scale was very strong. So we thought about what kind of "conservative" Goldwater really was. We wondered if he would really gamble on that ploy. It was a tough one. I was so confused that I sent my absentee ballot in too late. I think it was for LBJ.
So here we are again. Two wars that the democrats have happily taken over from those terrible people. Now we are going to drill for oil off the coast here. And so it goes.
I think Mailer was absolutely right. The extremists on the right give us a face for what this country is really all about. Now the question is will we deal with it or will we go on playing the same old game? Helen Keller saw it way back in her day. The emperor's new clothes are still what they always were. Why do we keep admiring them?